


birthdays are a useless thing

by gooberjam



Series: unfinished goop [1]
Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 20:45:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18454304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooberjam/pseuds/gooberjam
Summary: i'm posting some of my unfinished fic things from a while ago as a weird sort of celebratory thing for 4/13. this one dates back to 2017, so not too long ago but not too recent either.this is just me sort of exploring the narrative a bit of john and his depression. short and sweet, and doesn't really go anywhere, but it's fun all the same.





	birthdays are a useless thing

your name is john egbert, you are nearly 20 years old, and you have been staring at your reflection for almost 2 minutes now.

  
  
or, well.... maybe “at” isn’t the best use of the word.

  
  
your name is john egbert, your 20th birthday is on friday, and you have been staring through your reflection for 2 minutes and a good few, hearty seconds.

  
  
you have a number of interests, like movies and magic and um. maybe not magic so much any more, now that you think about it, but you also really like programming, you guess. sort of. you haven’t tried programming in, oh man... 6 years now?

  
  
um...

  
  
you still like movies! or at least, you still like the ones you’ve liked since you were 13. there was a brief (and absolutely bonkers) period of time when you questioned yourself and your taste in film, but that was pretty much a blip on an otherwise impeccable passion record concerning some of cinemas finest.

  
  
it is fairly commonplace to find you perusing choice installments from your collection on any given night. sometimes you can not even wait until then! there have been many mornings where you’ve chosen to accompany breakfast with some high class entertainment. occasionally, the entertainment is so fulfilling that you do not even have room for a breakfast alongside it! that is just how totally rad you think these movies are.

  
  
you used to make a whole deal of movie viewings. appropriate snackage was a must, and an enthusiastic buddy or two was basically required. you’ve had to make adjustments to your strict policy over the years; your friends have a lot going on nowadays, and there isn’t really much point in bugging them to watch a movie with you that they’ve all seen already, lots of them multiple times.

  
  
you think this move towards the more casual is probably good for you. growing up often means there is less room for the dramatic ideals and tendencies you are known for. it has made you a much more chill kind of guy, you think. you used to totally flip the fuck out over crazy stupid things, like corporate conspiracies and poorly executed jokes. maybe not all of the time it was for a stupid reason, but the way you’d react would be kind of predictably over the top and unnecessary. there’s a time and a place, and usually that means “not whenever,” and “ideally alone.”

  
  
you were just finishing getting ready for work when you got distracted by absolutely nothing. you kind of just... fell through the mirror as you were checking if the face butchering from shaving last night had improved any.

  
  
it sort of did. it is certainly not any kind of ground breaking conclusion that required 2 whole minutes of your time. 

  
snapping back from your brain sinkhole, you blink slightly at your kind of frumpy visage, and offer a half assed twitch of a smile to yourself. maybe as a shitty peace offering? you don’t really know.

  
  
you just know you definitely do not have time to address whatever your hair is doing, and you kind of don’t care any way. 

  
snagging your phone from the bathroom counter you make your way downstairs, dutifully avoiding eye contact with any of the probably/definitely haunted harlequin artifacts littered around your house. you don’t feel like getting super ultra mega clown-cursed today, or at any point in your life ever. 

  
you used to be able to meet eye to eye with these chuckle fucks on a daily basis, but as you age, you are increasingly less likely to make it out of a killer klown type scenario, and would prefer to not risk it. you also maybe think a ghost demon somehow got into your house at some point a couple of years ago, because you have definitely felt legitimate terror looking at that shitty figurine collection by the fireplace that you had not felt before. if only the ghostbusters were real, then you could get to the bottom of this caper that doesn’t actually matter to you in the slightest. 

  
as you’re snagging a banana from the kitchen for breakfast, your phone sputters out a few buzzes and you pause, fetching it from your pocket to see if it actually has a reason to be buzzing this time. 

  
it’s been 2 years since dave gave you his old iphone when he upgraded to the new one so he and the rest of the gang could “actually contact you” and “not just have father times torture device vore messages like its fitting to upchuck the next odyssey.” 

  
it took a while to adjust to your very first apple product, not including the heinous things the previous owner had done to it that you also had to learn to navigate around. the screen is split across the middle by one shitty crack apparently born from one of the strifes dave used to get into with his bro. it’s not too invasive, but occasionally the phone will seize up and there will be some weird glitchy horizontal lines that bleed from it. the phone also likes to play “app roulette” at random, killing an application for no reason at all and refusing to let it be opened again until you turn it off and back on again. because of its sporadic, laggy nature, text notifications tend to manifest almost like it’s coughing them up. 

  
you like to give dave shit for it in a playful teasing friend manner, mentioning it whenever appropriate.  it doesn’t actually bother you, though. like how dave likes to retaliate, “it is nowhere near as terminal as your mesopotamian shit tablet was.” 

  
the text, when the screen finally turns on, is (kind of predictably) from jade. it isn’t relevant to anything, it’s just a cute picture of a dog making a silly face, but it causes you to finally take notice of the time and realize you are 10 minutes late for your 3rd day on the job. 

  
if it wasn’t just a shitty mall kiosk thing, maybe you would take this more seriously as a cue to get your ass in gear, but instead you just kinda sigh and sit down on the kitchen counter as you start to peel your breakfast. 

  
jobs, as you have found during this incredibly magical journey called adulthood, are not really your thing. you have had more jobs than a person is probably meant to have had by almost 20, and pretty much all of them have been horrible. not really HORRIBLE-horrible, more just... really shitty for you. 

  
the last time you were really serious about pursuing a career, you were going to be a magician, and that dream died a while ago when you realized you can’t do sleight of hand even a little. you’d thought it was the perfect solution to your grand-ambition problem; a magicians job is basically to super prank people all the time. it was something fun and casual, and involved a long-standing family tradition, but you also don’t think you ever REALLY thought it would pan out into anything. you aren’t stupid, magic has been a dying trade for ages now. 

  
programming was never close to a career option considering you are only good at programming the virtual equivalent of massive dumps. 

  
it’s not too big of a deal, but you admit it is kind of frustrating and draining basically having to rely on trial and error. 

  
unlike a lot of your friends, you aren’t super great at just having a kind of shitty job. how long dave managed to stay in his miserable best buy job would be almost admirable if it weren’t so sad. even jade put up with working at whole foods for much longer than she realistically had to, or probably should have considering how she sort of lost it at the end. 

  
you’ve yet to figure out why it’s so difficult for you. it doesn’t really help that you actively try not to think too hard about it. whenever you do, you tend to feel weird.


End file.
